The lecture discusses the methods which digital humanities are testing to create scholarly sound representations of textual sources in historical studies. The special interest historians take in their text strengthens the argument made by Patrick Sahle, that digital edition advances a pluralistic notion of what a “text” is: You consider it an individual physical object as a method to convey information, regardless of its material form – or you can use many other conceptualizations. The abstraction of code allows to represent all of these conceptualizations digitally. In the context of automatic recognition of handwritten text and semantic web technologies the typical approach to text by historians has the tendency to delegate paleographical, philological, and linguistic approaches. Scholarly editions therefore tend to become „assertive“ editions, in which the digital representation of the content comes to the foreground and is linked into the universe of open data.

Georg Vogeler has studied Historical Auxiliary Sciences in Munich. He worked on taxation records in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire, on the charters of Frederic II. of Hohenstaufen, on scholarly editing (in particular of historical accounts), in the field of Digital Diplomatics, and on the use of semantic web methods for humanities research. He is co-founder of the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (IDE), professor for Digital Humanities at Graz University and co-director of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.